Mann “Faces Off” All By Himself

The USA Today author seems a bit confused about the difference between “facing off” and “jerking off”.  A face off involves two people, and would mean actually showing up for a debate – something the hockey team would never do.

Michael Mann faces off with foes on ‘Hockey Stick’ tour

Hockey sticks and brawls aren’t just for NHL playoff games. Climate scientist Michael Mann has the scars to prove it. But along the way he has picked up some fans as well.

The “Hockey Stick” — the term given to a graph depicting the globe’s average temperatures over the last millennium, looking like a flat shaft with a “blade” spiking upward at the end of the 20th Century — made Penn State’s Mann and his colleagues into magnets for controversy among climate naysayers. Largely, they criticized the hockey stick’s stark depiction, based for the most part on tree-ring data, of rising temperatures driven by global warming. The graph became famous after it appeared in a 2001 United Nations climate panel report.

Critics, most notably Canadian mining executive Steve McIntyre, argued that the type of statistics Mann used to collate past temperatures from tree rings inevitably introduced biases toward warming in the hockey stick reconstruction. But among scientists, a 2006 National Academy of Sciences report headed by Texas A&M’s Gerald North that largely vindicated temperature reconstructions settled a lot of debate.

Michael Mann faces off with foes on ‘Hockey Stick’ tour – USATODAY.com

A “climate naysayer” would be someone who doesn’t believe that there is a climate?